Non-DB table sorting

Xaositect has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm putting together a web page table, and using it (among other things) as a chance to learn some perl. I'd like to provide the user with sort-by-column functionality.
The data set isn't big enough to warrant a real database behind the scenes, but it's also big enough to make client-side JavaScript sorting questionable. (Tendancy to "hang" while it sorts, at least if a page is reloading the user knows something is happening)

The obvious language-independant server-side approach here is to load the entire dataset into a 2D array, sort, and iterate through the first dimension while printing table rows.
This seemed like a straightforward task, perl provides a sort function that accepts a sub to compare (sort) with. Loading the data into a list of lists is easy enough, however, I'm a little confused regarding how the reference syntax would work in this sort sub.

This seems like a common type of task, sorting by something other than the first index in a list of lists, does anyone have a solution they're particularly proud of?

Comment on Non-DB table sorting

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(tye)Re: Non-DB table sorting
by tye (Sage) on Aug 10, 2002 at 03:33 UTC

I like sorting an array of indices for stuff like that:

    my @data= ([...],[...],...);
    my $idx= 3;
    my @idx= sort {
        $data[$a][$idx] <=> $data[$b][$idx]
    }, 0..$#data;
    for my $row (  @data[@idx]  ) {
        for my $value (  @{$_}  ) {
            ...
        }
    }
# or
    print $q->table(
      map {
        $q->Tr(
          map {
            $q->td($_)
          } @{$_}
        )
      } @data[@idx]
    );
[download]

As for figuring out complex data structure dereferencing syntax, I found that References Quick Reference made it so I never had any problems with that again.

tye

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[d/l]

Re: Non-DB table sorting
by grep (Monsignor) on Aug 10, 2002 at 06:21 UTC

DBD::CSV

ORDER BY

This is also quite nice if you have experience with SQL

grep

Just me, the boy and these two monks, no questions asked.

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[d/l]

Re: Non-DB table sorting
by perrin (Chancellor) on Aug 10, 2002 at 03:22 UTC

FAQ

[reply]


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